Status and social position

The standard opinion concerning the apothecary's status is embodied in the statement by Hamilton that in 1660, ".. . a physician was a gentleman, while apothecaries and surgeons were mere craftsmen", with its further elaboration: that "At that time [ 1617] they [the apothecaries] were compounders and dispensers of medicine, and the stigma of 'tradesmen' clung to them long after the sale of drugs had ceased to be the main function of the individual apothecary, though not of the company". She then said that after the Civil War the status of the apothecary was rising, but "The apothecaries seem to have been mainly sons of small shopkeepers, yeomen and respectable craft-smen. In towns the practising apothecary was of low status: but in the country, where he was usually the only doctor, he was sometimes a man of good family who had qualified in the cheapest and most useful way; there he might take his position according to his family rather than according to his occupation. But the average apothecary did not come of a good or wealthy family; indeed the profession was one way for the lowest classes to climb".304 The physicians of the College would have readily concurred with this view. As Cameron has written, "The Physicians decried the Apothecaries as men ignorant, unlettered, and unlearned in the science of medicine and in opprobrium called them empirics".305 The jealous, ill-founded diatribes of the nervous fellows of the College have echoed and re-echoed down through the centuries and can be heard to this day. "Just as a tinker-soldier or a sailor-ploughboy is impossible, so a gentleman-apothecary is unthinkable." "Edmund Withering [an apothecary], who for his station and time was wealthy met and even more unusually married Miss Hector, the sister of Dr Brooke Hector of Lichfield."306 "At this time [1768] ... the apothecaries of the era were not recognised as professional men, and, in an age of quacks, they were barely respectable."307 "George Cooke of Fitton, the object of Corbett's frequent gibes because he had been an apothecary, made his submission and was restored to his living."308 The denigration of the apothecaries continued with a group who were in some degree, their successors, the chemists and druggists. W. J. Reader, in his study of the rise of the professional classes in nineteenth-century England, when considering the effects of the Medical Act of 1886, wrote that it, ".. . finally shut …